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It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Spells
Right
Alike
Thing
Tunes
Always
Seemed
Exactly
Magic
Sort
Music

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When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
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There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
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The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
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If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
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The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
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You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
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The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
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The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
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It is useless work that darkens the heart.
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
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Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
Ursula K. Le Guin